System Change not Climate Change- Report-back on the "Climate Space" at the WSF

On May 16, 2013, I had the opportunity to hear two respected leaders in the climate and social justice movements report back on the the California contingent's experience at the World Social Forum, where the U.S. contingent (the Grassroots Global Justice Alliance) hosted the WSF's first "Climate Space."

Maria Poblet, the Executive Director of Causa Justa::Just Cause (CJJC), and Miya Yoshitani, Associate Director of the Asian Pacific Environmental Network (APEN), both based in my home city of Oakland, CA, talked about their experience in Tunisia. They also asked the audience (which was a packed room, a mix of old and young, speaking Spanish, Chinese, and I think Tagolog, with three simultaneous translators working at the back of the room) what was the root of climate change. People offered science (the greenhouse effect), mistaken science (the ozone layer), and economics (capitalism). We ate take-out Chinese food and shared in some of the contingent's favorite photos, memories, and songs from their week in Tunisia. They closed out the report-back by leading us in some of their favorite chants, including: 

No war! No warming! Build the people's economy!

In the slide show of photos from the trip, I noticed these signs:

Another World is Possible
REDD+ = Colonialism
NO-REDD IN AFRICA NETWORK
System Change not Climate Change

Climate change was really and truly on the agenda at the Forum. Read the Climate Space declaration produced by its 19 international facilitating organizations at the 2013 WSF. It reads, in part:

We need a new system that seeks harmony between humans and nature and not an endless growth model that the capitalist system promotes in order to make more and more profit. Mother Earth and her natural resources cannot sustain the consumption and production needs of this modern industrialized society. 

To get a flavor for the report-back, read Revolution Under Construction, Maria's post for the blog Organizing Upgrade on the WSF experience. It's not about the Climate Space, but about the particular moment in Tunisia of the WSF, in terms of political change. With a great photo gallery.

Read Miya's blog post about the 2013 WSF: Confessions of a climate denier in Tunisia, about how she came to link the environmental justice movement with the work of  "stopping the world from mass suicide by carbon." She writes:

The point is, that the climate justice fight here in the US and around the world is not just a fight against the ecological crisis of all time, it is the fight for a new economy, a new energy system, a new democracy, a new relationship to the planet and to each other, for land, water, and food sovereignty, for indigenous rights, for human rights and dignity for all people. When climate justice wins we win the world that we want.

We can’t sit this one out not because we have too much to lose, but because we have too much to gain.

Amen.

Sub-Saharan Africa Puts up a Great Green Wall - Viva la Grande Muraille Verte!

This is just amazing: The Great Green Wall of Africa (D. Lieber, Planetsave.com/ Importantmedia.org, Apr. 21, 2013)

The main website for the project is in French with auto-translations to English and Arabic via Google Translate (so, not quite translated). The auto-translate English version of the project's vision describes the two stages of the project:

The major targets of the relevant indicators are:

 (i) in 2020-2025, halting the advance of desertification, restore and enhance the potential of arid and semi-arid and install the conditions for sustainable development and 

(ii ) term, [original: à terme,] achieve the transformation of vast arid Sahel real rural production centers and Sustainable Development (SDPRP) vectors powerful incentive to return to the land forces.

Indeed! May we return to the land forces! Viva la Grande Muraille Verte! Such an inspiring project.

Packing for Denver - the Inaugural National Adaptation Forum

I'm very pleased to be heading to Denver tomorrow for the inaugural National Adaptation Forum from April 2-4, where I'll see many colleagues from around the country. Unfortunately (and confusingly), I won't see my colleagues working for the federal U.S. government, thanks to the sequester. (Read the March 1, 2013, Environmental News Service article on some of the environmental costs of the sequester.) Way to shoot yourselves in the collective foot, Congress. When one of the key people working on adaptation through the landscape conservation cooperatives here in California said she couldn't go to the NAF because of the sequester, an NGO offered to help pay for her trip, and she said she couldn't even be SEEN there, presumably because there are regulations preventing her from accepting the funding to send her there. Our federal employees are not just not being funded to go, they aren't allowed to go! Luckily, conference organizers say, there was time to find replacement speakers for most of the victims of the sequester.

Those of you who will be there, look for me on Tuesday (Day 1) during breaks and between 5 PM and 7 PM by my poster on scenarios for natural resource adaptation planning that I put together for last year's international adaptation conference in Tucson.

I would list the sessions that I'm looking forward to attending, but there really are too many to list. I'm choosing between appealing options in every session. Here's the agenda as of March 29, 2013.

Now, back to watching the astonishing take-down that Louisville's women's basketball team is presently executing on the legendary Baylor team.

President of AMS: climate change is affecting African Americans disproportionately

In a February 11, 2013, article for Ebony magazine, President of the American Meteorological Society Dr. J. Marshall Shepherd points to evidence that African Americans are disproportionately affected by climate change. He gives a few well-known areas of research where African-Americans are shown to be more exposed to climate impacts-- such as the urban heat island effect, air quality impacts combined with the prevalence of asthma ("which affects Blacks at a 36 percent higher rate of incidence than Whites"), social vulnerability, economic vulnerability, and labor market vulnerability, for example:

In the South, lower income African-Americans and Hispanics are employed as wage laborers either directly or indirectly in the agricultural industry, which is particularly sensitive to weather and climate variability, especially drought.

To these factors I would add - at least in some places - a lack of trust in the government and governmental sources of information about health and emergency preparedness. In one study I read looking at indicators by which you can measure a country's ability to recover after a natural disaster (The determinants of vulnerability and adaptive capacity at the national level and the implications for adaptation- Brooks, Adger, Kelly, 2005), a top indicator was the effectiveness of a government. While that study was international in scope, the idea is relevant to communities within the U.S. If your community has a history of being deprived the full protection of the law, and/or your community doesn't believe the government is taking its interests to heart, it is less likely to respond to a call to retreat from an oncoming storm, or take shelter from a heat wave in government-sponsored cooling centers, or to follow instructions about how to create a household emergency kit.

This study and others I've read like it all point to the need to discuss vulnerability at a sub-national level, trying to identify communities with special exposure to climate impacts, just as Dr. Shepherd has done.

The next, step, of course, is to put this research to work improving the emergency preparedness and health care access for African-American communities in the U.S.-- a good thing to do in any case, but particularly in the face of climate change.

"America cannot resist this transition [to sustainable energy sources]; we must lead it."

Standing, applauding. Thank you, President Obama!

We, the people, still believe that our obligations as Americans are not just to ourselves, but to all posterity. We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations. Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms. The path towards sustainable energy sources will be long and sometimes difficult. But America cannot resist this transition; we must lead it. We cannot cede to other nations the technology that will power new jobs and new industries - we must claim its promise. That is how we will maintain our economic vitality and our national treasure - our forests and waterways; our croplands and snowcapped peaks. That is how we will preserve our planet, commanded to our care by God. That’s what will lend meaning to the creed our fathers once declared.

From the January 21, 2013, inaugural speech 

Key to water management adaptation? Mostly good management.

Check out an excellent blog post "Climate change and California water – past, present and future" (Jan. 13, 2013) by Professor Jay Lund from UC Davis' Center for Watershed Sciences.

He makes a few excellent points, with the bottom line that good management for climate change is mostly just good management. He points out the fact that climate change isn't the only signal that managers will have to monitor: "In the past 100 years, California water management has changed tremendously, driven by changes in population, economic structure, technology, and social and environmental objectives."

He also points out that we don't necessarily need any more reservoirs here in California: "with some changes in reservoir management, existing large reservoirs on most of California’s rivers can largely accommodate seasonal shifts in runoff." And, an important detail for those wringing their hands over California's warming climate: precipitation and other unknowns are probably more important to monitor than temperature.

Change in total precipitation is more important than warming alone. The physical, economic and ecological instability of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta probably poses more risk to California’s water supply than climate warming.

Next weekend I expect to be heading up to the California Water Law Symposium at UC Davis, where I'm sure I'll hear more wisdom from Professor Lund's corner.

Congratulations Oakland on your new Climate Action Plan!

Congratulations Garrett Fitzgerald, Oakland's Sustainability Coordinator, and the rest of Oakland's Public Works Sustainable Oakland Department, and the Oakland Climate Action Coalition (now the Local Clean Energy Alliance) and the rest of the active community supporters, for the unanimous passage of the "Oakland Energy and Climate Action Plan" at the Oakland City Council meeting last night. Read the draft version here, which will be the same as the final, I presume, unless the CEQA process changed something. Sustainability maven Rebecca Kaplan moved for its passage and, except for the one person excused from the meeting (Jane Brunner), it was all ayes.

The eight people giving comments before the passage of the plan all had praise to offer, but also a few constructive criticisms, including the need for the plan to address the need for more trees in Oakland with a master plan for planting. That comment came from a representative of Urban Releaf, from Richmond, CA. After the plan passed, Garrett and the Urban Releaf contingent reconnoitered in the hallway, and I got to hear Garrett tell the woeful tale of how a few years ago Oakland was up for $50,000 in matching funds for urban greening from CalFire, but it was lost because the expenditure, approved at the City Council, was misclassified by a clerk and therefore disappeared along with the opportunity for the matching funds. City layoffs have left the Public Works Department with no institutional memory about the original plan for those funds.

On a positive fiscal note, I learned at the meeting that $35 million in unexpected revenue from economic growth has shown up in Oakland's coffers, and the City Council is gearing up to allocate it. Trees won't be on the priority list before basic infrastructure maintenance and safety, but it's just to say that Oakland should not despair of its ability to renew itself.